Regional Updates MIDDLE EAST/MEDITERRANEAN COMMENTS Egypt’s supply ministry has announced that the government’s wheat storage capacity will be expanded to 3.9 MMT by 2022. While first announced last fall, this now seems to be “officially” approved. Some of it seems to be part of the second phase of the Blumberg Grain storage development project in that country. Egypt has cleared its former supply minister of corruption in the local wheat buying scandal of 2016, which involved the payment for up to 2 MMT of wheat that did not exist. All criminal charges against him have been dropped. Egypt’s statistics agency CAPMAS has reported that the country’s self-sufficiency rate for wheat has dropped from 50 per...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.